


Unto the Daughters of Men

by glimmerglanger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Always Female Dean Winchester, Angst, Childbirth, F/M, Nephilim, Rule 63, Season 5-6 AU, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 08:37:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20793782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glimmerglanger/pseuds/glimmerglanger
Summary: Consequences are funny things. Sometimes you see them coming.  Sometimes you don’t see them at all.  Deanna isn’t thinking about the consequences of her actions when she throws a leg over Cas and sinks down to his lap.  It’ll turn out later that she should have been, but, hell, at the time it had seemed pretty clear that they were all going to die before the sun went down again.





	Unto the Daughters of Men

**Author's Note:**

> Seems that the show is finally coming to an end. This inspired me into a rewatch, which reminded me of how much I loved the early seasons, which brought back my full love of Destiel, which turned into the inspiration to finish this very, very old fic. And here we are.

Consequences are funny things.

Sometimes you see them coming. For instance, ending up in Hell hadn’t been a huge surprise for Deanna. That particular consequence had been above board and looming from the very moment she managed to bring Sammy back. Having her freewill burned away by an angel riding in her meat-suit, that had been another one of those consequences that put itself out there. That one she had even managed to avoid.

Sometimes you don’t see them at all. Deanna isn’t thinking about the consequences of her actions when she throws a leg over Cas and sinks down to his lap. It’ll turn out later that she should have been, but, hell, at the time it had seemed pretty clear that they were all going to die before the sun went down again. You got one day left to live, you make some decisions you otherwise wouldn’t.

Deanna decides that she likes the way Cas’s arms come up, the way he grabs her hips on the wrong side of too hard, that little hint that he’s more than flesh and blood. She decides she likes the way his eyes go wide and dark, the way that he doesn’t think to shift in an attempt to hide his body’s response to her, the way he leans forward away from the back of the chair, closer to her. She likes that when she asks, leaning close and brushing the side of her nose against his, “Do you even know why you stare at me?” he shivers.

She likes how throaty his voice is when he says, “I have an idea.”

“Let’s see if you’re right,” she kisses him, likes that too. Likes that he doesn’t freeze. He’s eager. A fast learner. He grabs her and pulls her closer. “Yeah,” she breathes between a kiss, “I think you’ve got it,” she grinds her hips down against him, a deliberate tease, the consequences of which she is almost certain about.

She’s right. Cas stands up so abruptly that his chair topples over backwards. Deanna starts to straighten her legs, but Cas holds her solid weight like it’s nothing. She can work with that. She hooks her legs around his waist, rolls her hips against him as he goes across the room. The first thing to surprise her is that they end up on the bed, and not against the wall or across the floor.

They are inelegant with removing their clothing. Deanna tears at her jeans, rips her shirt over her head and watches at least one of Cas’s buttons go flying. He looks unsure once he’s naked, standing there beside the bed and breathing hard, his hair going every direction imaginable. “Come here,” Deanna says, and he does, presses against her, touches her with hungry abandon.

When she curls a leg around his hip, when she pulls him close, he cries out and it isn’t a language that Deanna knows. But it’s beautiful and it echoes like it has power, real power. It sinks down into Deanna’s skin and her temperature rises, she tingles—everywhere. The sizzling sensation of it distracts her through Cas’s short, hard thrusts. He gasps again, sets her nerves aflame, when he hunches over her. She can feel him tremble when he comes.

He kisses her afterwards, her mouth, her jaw, her neck, lower. Deanna opens her mouth to mention that she’d be more comfortable if she could shift her hips, that they can be done, despite the tingling insistence of her nerves that she push his head lower, that she plead with him to speak again. Cas rolls against her, inside her, before she can gather the breath for words. “Ah,” Deanna gasps, dumbly, and Cas buries his face against her neck, wraps his arms around her back, panting words her body responds to against her ear and fucking her.

Deanna hadn’t anticipated an orgasm. Not really. She just hadn’t wanted to be alone and this had been the obvious way to secure companionship. So that’s the first unintended consequences that she gets, one hand buried in Cas’s hair, the other scrambling for purchase across his back and shoulders, her nerves going molten and glorious, every part of her trying to draw him closer. Cas growls her name against her ear, the first word she’s understood in what feels like an age, pushes himself up onto his arms and for a split-second, Deanna thinks he is finished.

He isn’t. The new position drives her up the bed. Deanna groans, throws her arms out above her head and grabs the headboard. She burns under the intensity of Cas’s gaze, dragging across the bare lines of her skin heavy as a touch. Deanna considers that she may very well die here and now, when Cas shifts his weight onto only one arm, and brushes his knuckles up the side of her breast.

By morning, there are holes in the wall, and the bed is broken. Deanna tells herself that if she somehow lives through the day, she’ll come back and pay for the damage.

The front-desk clerk of the motel looks completely confused when Deanna shows up a few days later, drops a stack of twenties on the counter, and leaves without a word. She isn’t in the mood for talking.

#

So, consequences.

Deanna has a lot of them to deal with, after Stull. She’s alive. Sam is not. Cas is gone, and Deanna can’t quite convince herself that she didn’t just imagine the tenderness of his touch before he left, the hesitation in his gaze. Wouldn’t be the first time she saw something in someone else that she only wanted to be there. Lisa and Ben look relieved when she shows up on their doorstep, the fallout of the last promise she ever made to Sam. They welcome her in with open arms and impossible gentleness.

Lisa holds Deanna when she sleeps and doesn’t push too hard when Deanna can’t. For a month, Deanna thinks she is dealing with the full brunt of her choices. For a month, Deanna thinks that she’s going to be able to.

She’s wrong. Surprise.

#

Most people, Deanna thinks, find out they’re pregnant courtesy of peeing on a stick. Or maybe they throw up too many times for it to be coincidence. Maybe their miraculously bigger boobs give it away. Deanna doesn’t know. That isn’t how it happens for her. This is how it happens for her:

Deanna is standing out on the pitcher’s mound of Ben’s little-league field. They’re technically supposed to be on their way home, Deanna is supposed to pick up dinner on the way, but she’d overheard some of the little assholes on Ben’s team giving him shit about his swing. So they’re here, instead, long after the rest of the kids and their parents left. Her shoulder is starting to burn from the pitches that she’s thrown, but the strain is gone from Ben’s shoulders, and he no longer looks like he’d rather turn the bat on himself than the ball.

Deanna calls, “How about a couple of more?” and gets a shy, pleased smile for her reward. And that’s when some guy comes storming across the park. Deanna grimaces, figuring that they’re about to get bawled out for being on the diamond at an unsanctioned time, or something. She waves at Ben to give her a moment, tucking her mitt under her arm and turning to offer the guy—he looks like he was jogging—a disarming smile.

It’s something of a surprise when the man snarls, “Abomination,” and reaches for her.

“Ben, run!” Deanna dodges to the side, taking a deep breath of the air, trying to figure out what this is. She doesn’t smell sulfur, or a rotting stench, nothing at all but human sweat. She hadn’t really thought that the things that went bump in the night were just going to let her go without a fight. But she also hadn’t thought that they’d come after her in the middle of the day, on a baseball diamond. She’s glad that she brought a gun, anyway, even though Lisa makes faces about Deanna carrying one.

She draws it now, giving ground in the face of the advance that hasn’t halted, trying to look around Big and Angry here to make sure Ben is beating feet away. She can’t get a clear look. She snaps, “That’s far enough, asshole,” and the guy disregards her entirely. His face is contorted up with pure disgust. And hatred.

Deanna puts a bullet in his leg and he doesn’t even flinch. “Shit,” she hisses, “shit, shit,” because he is no more concerned by the slug to his heart are his forehead and there are a very limited amount of beasties that keep coming through cold iron there.

The guy grabs her, his hand huge and meaty and crushingly strong. He spits at her, “Be still and I will destroy the misbegotten monster in your womb without harming you.” And he stretches out his other hand for her stomach. There’s a blinding glow against his palm. Angel, Deanna thinks, scrambling her heels against the loose sand and slicing her palm open, even though she knows it’s useless, that she doesn’t have enough time, why’d it have to be an angel? “Stop struggling,” the angel snarls.

And Ben, who is going to get a long talking to about when to listen to his goddamn elders, steps up behind the angel and practices his perfect swing across the back of its head. It doesn’t do anything. But the angel turns his head, catching Ben with the back of his forearm and flinging him across the diamond, and that’s all the time Deanna needed to smear a messy sigil across the angel’s shirt.

“Later, asshole,” she growls, and slams her palm against it.

Ben is sprawled in the bottom of the third-base line dugout. He is just starting to stir when Deanna grabs him and hauls him to his feet. He says, slurring just a little, “What was that? Deanna, what was that?”

“Trouble,” she tells him, grabbing her phone and punching in Lisa’s number.

#

Deanna’s brain always works fastest when she’s in the midst of an adrenaline burn. Sometimes she wishes it didn’t. Like now. She’d have enjoyed a bit more blissful ignorance before her mind considered what the angel had said and decided, hey, maybe she better make a stop at the drug store. Lisa pulls into the driveway, cutting out of work early at Deanna’s call, and comes into the house just as Deanna puts the pregnancy test on the sink and stares at it, feeling her mind go completely and totally silent.

Deanna hears Lisa call for her. She is distantly aware that Lisa is hugging Ben, who is cradling an icepack to the lump on the back of his head. Ben is, somewhere far away, trying to explain what happened. And then Lisa is standing shoulder to shoulder with Deanna, and asking, flat and sad, or maybe angry, “You’re pregnant?”

“I can’t be,” Deanna tells the window, numbly.

Lisa is quiet for a long, long time. Or maybe it only feels that way. Deanna is feeling a bit unstuck in time. She thinks Lisa is trying to be gentle when she speaks again, “It probably felt like you couldn’t be, but that’s—”

“No,” Deanna interrupts to correct, “I can’t be. I,” but she stops, looking down at her stomach. She pulls at the edge of her shirt, runs her fingers over the smooth skin below her bellybutton, where, once upon a time, a poltergeist had driven three feet of rebar right through her guts, taking out a big enough portion of Deanna’s uterus that she’d been told, by a very grim-faced surgeon, that she’d never be able to have kids. The puckered scar is gone. Has been gone, Deanna realizes, since she pulled a Lazarus. “Oh, fuck,” she breathes.

See: consequences. Those bastards.

#

“Where are you going?” Lisa demands, half-an-hour later. She’s standing in the garage door, her arms folded over her chest. She looks scared. Worried. When Deanna slams the Impala’s hood closed, she can see Ben, standing behind Lisa and mirroring her expression. “Deanna, I’m serious. You just found out you’re, you’re pregnant and now you’re running off. Slow down. Tell me what’s going on.”

Deanna blinks. In her head, she’s trying to remember if she has everything. If the sigils she’d carefully placed all around Lisa’s house when she first arrived included angel-warding spells. She’s thinking about how long it’s going to take to get to Bobby’s. She’s very, very, _very_ carefully not thinking about Cas. She can’t risk winging off a prayer. Not right now. “Deanna!”

She shakes herself. Scaring Lisa and Ben is the last thing she wanted to do. But she can’t think of an explanation that isn’t just going to scare them more. Lisa must be able to tell, because she says, firm and hard, “Just tell me the truth. Please.”

“You remember I told you about angels?” Deanna figures she’ll start slow. Lisa nods, and Deanna licks her lips, pressing against the cut on her palm to keep herself grounded, focused. “Well, the guy that came after me was an angel.”

“I thought,” Lisa blows out a hard breath, “I thought the angels were on our side? Now?”

Deanna shrugs. “Guess not.” She’d thought that, too. But there hadn’t been anything remotely friendly in Baby Killer’s face. “I can’t stay here. I didn’t kill him, I only sent him away, and he’ll be back. With buddies, probably.” Knowing Deanna’s luck, anyway.

Lisa shoves her hand back through her hair, shaking her head. She reaches back and grabs Ben, “Are we—is he going to come after us?”

Deanna stares up at her. The dark fall of her hair is so beautiful, framing her face, her clear eyes. She was supposed to be Deanna’s life. This house and Ben and whatever nine to five job Deanna eventually managed to get. That was how it was supposed to be. That was what Deanna promised Sam. Deanna swallows regret and maybe relief, and says, “Not if you don’t know where I went.”

#

The thing is, Deanna might not know the Bible front to back, but she’s got the Flood story pretty well down. She thinks maybe it’s a memory of church from when her mom was still alive. It’s not a story she ever thought would be directly relevant to her life, but thems the breaks. She’s got a half-angel baby inside her, and she remembers enough to know that’s kind of a big deal. The kind of big deal that needs more information. She turns the Impala north.

#

There’s something comfortingly familiar about Bobby’s kitchen. It smells a bit like incense and motor oil, and Deanna feels a bit of the strain she’s been caring in her back and shoulders ease. At least, until she asks, aiming for calm and coolly disinterested, “So, you know any lore about Nephilim?”

The way Bobby goes still dashes any hopes Deanna had that she was being subtle. Bobby squints at her and then squints down at the shot glass of whiskey that Deanna had pushed to the side without drinking. She can see him jumping to conclusions, and she’d like to interrupt, but, well. They’re the right conclusions. Bobby growls, “Balls,” snatches the shot of whiskey and downs it, slamming the empty glass down onto the table.

Deanna winces, “I know.”

Bobby rubs his face, takes off his hand and scratches his fingers back through his hair, so she knows he’s really concerned. He leans back in his chair, nods at her stomach, and drawls, “Daddy know yet?” He sighs, “I mean, I assume it’s—”

“Yeah,” Deanna interrupts with a shake of her head, grimacing, “you assume right. And no. He doesn’t.”

Bobby stares at her for another long moment. He leans forward and braces his elbows on the table, narrowing one eye at her, “Don’t you think he oughta?”

_Abomination_ the angel back at the diamond had called the impossible, proto-kid in Deanna’s gut, _monster_. Deanna firmly shakes her head, “Probably better if he doesn’t.” She wishes she could take a slug of the whiskey. Maybe it would help numb the crushing anxiety in her gut.

“Alright,” Bobby says, voice surprisingly gentle, “alright, Deanna. I’ll see what I can find in the lore.” His hand is warm on the back of her shoulder when he walks behind her chair and gives her a companionable pat. He calls, on his way out of the kitchen, “And get yourself some water, girl.”

#

Bobby brings a disappointingly small pile of books out to the kitchen when Deanna fries some hamburgers. At least two of them she recognizes as full of Bobby’s own handwriting. He says, pulling over a plate and raising his eyebrows at the food on it, “Sorry, kid, there isn’t much. Angels have kept a pretty low profile over the millennia. Near as I can figure, there are a couple of pretty famous Nephilim: Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Genghis Khan. You may recall how they all died abruptly. Probably there were more, but…”

“But the angels killed them,” Deanna finishes, pushing her plate away untouched. Her stomach doesn’t feel like it could handle anything more substantial than air.

Bobby nods. He isn’t eating his hamburger either, he’s just picking at the bun and looking grim. “That’s about the only thing the lore is clear on. Angels hunt the Nephilim down and kill them with extreme prejudice. And it’s not just angels. There’s some references to demons trying to get ahold of them,” he looks up and meets Deanna’s eyes, “for some seriously nasty spells.”

Deanna’s gut turns over. She presses her hand low against it. It feels completely the way it did a week ago. She can’t feel even a hint of another life there. Maybe the angel was mistaken, she tries to tell herself, but she doesn’t believe it. She swallows something that burns down the back of her throat, and asks, “But, I mean. On their own. Are they, you know, are they dangerous? Will it be…”

Bobby’s hand is warm and heavy when he squeezes Deanna’s. “There’s nothing to indicate that they’re any more evil than your average newborn.” Deanna laughs, even though it isn’t funny. It’s a miserable chuckle that spoils in the air around them. She presses her lips shut to keep it in.

“What’m I gonna do, Bobby?” she asks, staring at the cooling hamburger on her plate. Her stomach is in knots. There’s a _baby in her_. She isn’t—Deanna isn’t parent material, okay, she knows that. Any kid unlucky enough to be raised by her would probably be better off dead. And that’s assuming the kid was one-hundred percent human, not some mingling of an angel’s Grace and a human’s soul that’s going to be hunted by some of the most dangerous creatures Deanna’s ever had the displeasure of coming up against.

Bobby squeeze her hand again. He says, “I don’t know, kid. But I’ll help, whatever you decide. Why don’t you sleep on it, hm? No angels are going to get in here.”

#

Sleep does Deanna no favors. Mostly because it won’t come, it abandons her to tossing and turning, her thoughts digging around the inside of her skull. She could…get rid of it. It’s early days, yet. The hitchhiker inside of her can’t be much bigger than a speck of salt. She could just. Spare it. A lifetime of being hunted, of living with a constant sword over your head. If parents are supposed to do what’s best for their children, then isn’t that…?

But Deanna can’t imagine herself doing it. She just, she can’t. Just like she can’t lie still. She kicks off her blankets, swings her legs out of the bed and presses her feet against the cool floor, leaning over her legs and dropping her head into her hands. Maybe she’ll lose it. She’s heard statistics, some stupidly high amount of pregnancies don’t get past the first month, and she’s right on the edge of thirty days. If standard human pregnancies are so delicate, then surely whatever is in Deanna is at risk.

Then again, it survived one hell of a beating from Lucifer, and Deanna’s subsequent bender. Made of tough stuff, Deanna’s little passenger.

She thinks about praying to Cas. Telling him. Maybe she hadn’t imagined the way his fingers hesitated against her forehead before he pulled back. Maybe, maybe, maybe. She doesn’t pray to anyone. It—she can’t take the risk.

In the morning, she drags her weary bones down the stairs and asks Bobby, already up and bent over a tome on his desk, “How’d the angel even know I was pregnant?”

Bobby squints up at her. He sighs and spreads his arms out to the side. “No clue. You want my best guess?” Deanna nods. “He sensed the Grace, or whatever it has.”

Deanna swallows. That’s about what she’d figured. She crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe, “You got any ideas on how I could keep them from doing that?”

Bobby stares. Deanna lets him take his time, though she wants to squirm under the attention. Then Bobby sighs, rubs at his beard and says, “I’ll see what I can do.”

#

“I can’t stay here,” Deanna says hours later, when they’re no closer to finding a way to thwart the angels. They don’t know what exactly they’re trying to stop, or enough about angels to find a way to do it, or anything at all, really. And they’ve wasted half a day trying things they have no way to test. She pushes the heavy book she’d been reading through aside, rubbing at her forehead, continuing, “once that angel pulls himself back together, this is gonna be one of the first places they look for me.” She’s grateful that the sigils on her ribs mean that at least they won’t be popping up beside her at any moment.

“He might not have known who you were,” Bobby points out, but he doesn’t sound like even he believes it. Deanna eyes him, thinking about the impression she just finished making on Heaven, and he grimaces, “Where are you gonna go?” And then he throws a hand up, shaking his head, “Never mind. Safer if I don’t know.”

#

Bobby gives her the last of the holy oil. Deanna fills a flask with it and slides it into her pocket. Along with the angel blade that she stripped off of Zachariah, it’s the best defense she can hope for against the angels. If they come at her slowly and one at a time, she’ll probably be just fine. The rest of the oil she stows in the trunk. Bobby pulls her into a one-armed hug when Deanna slams the hood closed. He says, gruff against her ear, “You be careful, you hear me? I’ll keep my ear to the ground.”

#

Deanna goes with no destination and no real goal except staying off of the angel’s radar. She hadn’t thought there were any angels still on Earth, but obviously she’d been wrong. They’ve never come up with a good way to identify angels, unless she feels like summoning up a demon and using it as a watchdog. She doesn’t see that ending particularly well for her.

So she wanders. It’s kind of like a vacation, except Deanna doesn’t feel even remotely relaxed, and she doesn’t give half a shit about any of the places she blows through. She figures a moving target’ll be harder to find. On a whim, she picks up a pregnancy book, though who the hell knows how useful it’ll be in her case. She flips through it, in the long hours of the nights when she can’t sleep.

She buys prenatal vitamins and folic acid.

She doesn’t plan to hunt. She promised Sam she was done with that. And she’s, well, pregnant. And she doesn’t have the best history with blows to the gut. But life has given Deanna a sensitive radar to monsters causing trouble. And it turns out that she’s shit at walking away from that, once she notices it. She burns a poltergeist’s bones, she puts down a skinchanger, she finds trouble no matter where she looks. She talks to Bobby a few times a week, and lies about what she’s been up to.

For three months, Deanna almost convinces herself nothing has changed. She’s hunted alone before, after all. It’s just business as usual, with a few extra pills, no alcohol, and extra warding on the walls of the motels she stays in. It’s a stupid sort of stubbornness.

She pays for it in a town in Georgia, in a diner that she’d specifically picked because it was almost empty. Deanna is just settling down into her chair, with nice sightlines to the door and the kitchen, when a woman comes out of the bathroom, takes a deep breath, and orients towards Deanna. The woman’s eyes flare with blue-white light. Deanna curses under her breath, surging back to her feet, her hand going into her jacket, fingers finding the cool handle of the angel blade.

“Hey,” Deanna tries, “no reason this has to get nasty.”

The angel throws a hand out, and the far wall half-catches Deanna. The window doesn’t do so well, glass shatters around Deanna shoulder and crashes down around her feet and out into the parking lot. Panic and rage burn even the remnants of thoughts out of Deanna’s head. She bares her teeth at the angel, who is spitting disgustedly, “Whore. Did you think you could mislead me to ignore your perversion?”

“Just thought I’d give you a chance,” Deanna growls, straining against the invisible hold.

“Silence,” the angel snaps. Her hand drops, her fingers twist into claws, she stalks across the floor—more quickly than Deanna would have liked. Deanna has a half-second to come to grips with the fact that she’s about to die ugly, and then the angel grabs her hair and yanks her head back, her other hand poised in front of Deanna’s face, full of horrible light. “Who bred you?”

Deanna’s face twists up with distaste—good to know the angels are still assholes—even as her thoughts race behind them. She’d, apparently, been giving the angels more credit than she should have. She’d figured they’d take one look at who she was, and put it together the same way Bobby had. Unless maybe they _don’t_ know who she is. After all, most of the angels Deanna spent any time around are dead. The angel drags Deanna out of her head, pressing that light closer to Deanna’s cheek, and it burns, heat that makes Deanna’s breath catch, “The angel that committed this atrocity, who was it?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Deanna lies with a smile.

The angel glowers at her, and then snarls, “I will take the information myself, then,” bringing the hand in Deanna’s hair forward. Her fingertips press against Deanna’s forehead and Deanna tries not to scream. She doesn’t think she succeeds. The pain is blinding, it splinters back through Deanna’s brain, ricochets off the back of her skull and bounces down her spine, splinters below her ribs, radiates lower and there is a roar of sound so loud that it nearly deafens Deanna.

And the pain is gone.

Deanna blinks away spots. Her throat is burning. The angel is staring at Deanna with a mixture of disbelief and disgust, they echo in her voice, when she hisses, “No. No, it is a lie.” She shakes her head, visibly shaken by whatever she saw in Deanna’s head. Shaken enough that her hold on Deanna has wavered, and though Deanna is dizzy and nauseous, she seizes the opportunity. She doubts she’d get another.

Deanna and the angel go down together in an explosion of light and sound, Deanna’s hand pressed up against the angel’s side, the blade buried to the hilt in her guts. Deanna sprawls on the floor for a moment, tangled in the angel’s limbs and slipping around in the shattered glass. Deanna pushes herself up onto her knees, the stink of burnt ozone in her nose, every inch of her body aching. There are wings, burned black against the floor, up the side of a wall, and across an overturned chair. “Shit,” she mumbles, through numb lips, “shit, _shit_.”

She throws up.

#

Deanna is still trembling, twenty miles down the road. Her stomach hurts. Low. Her heart won’t slow down and she is frightened, terrified, and not of the angels. She doesn’t have the time to ward a motel room, so Deanna pulls off the side of the road and curls up in the backseat of the Impala, on her left side, sipping as much as she can with her raw, tight throat from a bottle of water. She keeps one of her hands pressed low over her stomach, trying to feel something—anything. “Please,” she pleads, to the empty, close air, “please, please, please, please.”

She falls asleep begging, and maybe someone hears her, because when she wakes up there is no pain and there is no blood. She leverages herself out of the backseat, throws up on the side of the road, and stands there afterwards, panting and thinking about what an idiot she’s been. Obviously, she needs a new plan.

#

Deanna figures the best thing to do is isolate herself. The fewer people around, the lower the chance of running into a meatsuit for a celestial being, the safer she’ll be. The safer the baby’ll be.

Deanna decides that Montana is as good a place as any when she meanders through it and is met with empty spaces at mountains. She pays a confused looking stoner to rent her a ramshackle cabin set at in the foothills of the mountains, back a long, narrow dirt road. It’s got running water, it’s got a woodstove, she gets one bar of cell service, and, by the time Deanna is done with it, it is warded against as many threats as she can think of. She wraps the cuts across her forearm roughly, afterwards. She sleeps that night the same way she’s slept every night since she found out she was pregnant: with one eye open and a hand curled around the angel blade.

There’s too much to do for the first few days. Deanna tarps the Impala. It’s just too noticeable. She goes out with a hat pulled low over her face and a baggy hoody of Sam’s and buys some cheap piece of shit to get around. She stocks up on as much food as the cabin can realistically hold. She keeps her head down and eyes everyone that so much as breathes around her with cold suspicion.

And then, abruptly, there’s _nothing_ to do.

She keeps talking to Bobby a couple of times a week. She chops wood; winter will be hitting soon. She takes long trips through the woods around her cabin, warding trees and trying to figure out possible angles of attack until she starts feeling like a paranoid nutcase. She washes her clothes in the sink and eats by herself and sometimes she stares up at the stars, clearer than she’s ever seen them, and wonders where among them Cas is.

#

Deanna has been pulling a Jeremiah Johnson for a month when the baby moves. She’s frowning at the pattern she’s been working on for a crib—something small and safe—when there’s a shivery little feeling of movement low in gut. She dismisses the first, and the second, her stomach has been doing some weird ass rumbling lately, but there’s a third and yeah, that’s definitely not stomach related movement. Deanna sits down heavily, tugging her shirt up, staring down at the barely there swell. The movements aren’t strong enough to be seen through her skin. But, oh, she can feel them.

She doesn’t remember deciding to call Bobby, but the phone is pressed against her ear, and Bobby is saying, “Deanna, it’s…three in the morning. Is something wrong?”

“It’s moving.” She doesn’t know why she’s whispering. “The baby. Bobby, the baby is moving.”

Bobby’s voice is choked and fond when he replies, words that Deanna can’t remember afterwards.

#

Time slip-slides away in the cabin. Deanna builds a crib and pulls the bed a little closer to the wood stove, as the days edge into fall. She talks to herself a lot. She has dreams—horrible dreams—whenever she manages to sleep. It gets harder by the day to find a comfortable position, but she manages it, finally, sometime in early November, six months after Deanna thought the world was going to end and it didn’t. She is deeply and peacefully asleep for once, and she startles straight from that deep blackness to full wakefulness, not sure why.

For a long moment, Deanna stays still, keeping her breathing slow and soft, straining her ears. Animals wander around outside the cabin sometimes. There was a raccoon that tore up her trash bags for a while. She doesn’t hear anything by the trash can. She doesn’t hear anything, she realizes after a moment. Not even the stupid owls that talk to each other half the night.

Deanna rolls to her feet as smoothly as is possible with her stomach, not huge yet, but definitely prominent. Her weapons are close, always at hand these days, and she palms a pistol, and the angel blade from beneath her pillow. It’s dark inside the cabin, the only light is from the one window beside the door. Deanna pads across the wooden floor, making sure to stay out of the silver glow.

She still hasn’t heard a damn thing. A careful peek out the window reveals nothing. But her gut says she isn’t alone, and Deanna’s gut is rarely wrong. She swallows. The cabin is warded. No angels are getting in, no demons, no ghosts.

She is just considering rechecking her salt lines, ducking to peer at the door, and a bullet punches through the window and right through the air where Deanna’s head had been a half second before.

Deanna doesn’t have a lot of time to think. Just enough to realize that it _wasn’t_ a bullet, but some kind of canister that is presently filling the cabin with gas. Deanna sucks in a breath and holds it, trying to think who would try to gas her—who wouldn’t just go for the easier bullet to the back of her head, but she doesn’t have time to ponder the mystery. The gas is burning her eyes.

Deanna shoulders the door open, scrambling for her woodpile and the relative safety of it, darting her eyes around the dark yard, trying to figure the shooter’s position. It’s cold outside, her breath steams immediately in front of her face and she can’t stop panting, trying to get clean air into her lungs. At least she doesn’t cough. T’s still enough to give her position away, there’s a bark of sound, and something hits the other side of the woodpile.

Deanna’s mind plays through angles and her memory of the yard and she bares her teeth. Deanna rises, adrenaline turns it into a smooth movement, bringing the gun up and firing. There’s a grunt and then a horrible gurgle. Someone, somewhere out in the dark, says, “Forget him. Get the woman.”

It’s funny, how cold those words make Deanna’s blood run.

Cold is something Deanna can work with.

She slips off of the porch, away from the gas that’s spilling out of the open door and billowing up in front of the woodpile. She knows this ground. She’s been living here for months now, after all. The air is cold through her oversized shirt and jeans, up through her bare feet, but it only sharpens her focus. “Dammit,” someone growls, “get the fucking goggles,” and Deanna pulls the trigger a half second before she starts running.

There’s a grunt and the heavy sound of a body hitting the ground, and Deanna takes a moment to enjoy that, while she’s trying to figure out who these assholes are. Not angels, most of them treat guns like some kind of child’s toy, Cas is the only one she’s ever seen use a firearm effectively and she can’t think about him right now. They wouldn’t be firing gas at her. Not demons, it isn’t their style, and anyway, they weren’t going to make it through the Devil’s Traps she has scattered everywhere on the approach to the cabin. Something else, then.

Deanna finds the body she shot by tripping over it. She drops beside it, trying to control her breathing. She finds a tac vest, sticky wet blood at the body’s neck, and, ah, goggles resting on top of the deformed head. Deanna’s smile feels wide, she pulls the goggles on, ignoring the way they stick against her skin, and flips them on, watching the world snap into focus.

There is a man not ten feet from her, looking the other way. He’s kneeling, his arm pressed up against his gut. Deanna pegs him as the one she shot from the porch. She crosses to him on the balls of her feet, steps on something that crunches a pace behind him, and braces the barrel of her gun against his temple before he can draw in a breath to yell. Deanna crouches, keys her voice low and soft, “How many of you? Who sent you?”

“Please don’t kill me,” the guy says, instead of anything helpful. His voice is all pain and panic and too loud. Deanna curses under her breath, her finger tightening in the trigger, and he babbles on, “please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to come. Please. Please, don’t kill me.”

Deanna jerks her arm forward and squeezes the trigger, aiming for the pale throat of the woman who had been trying to creep closer, drawn, no doubt, by this idiot being so damn loud. The idiot sobs, now, as his buddy goes down in a spray of hot blood, and Deanna snarls, presses the hot metal against his cheekbone, “Did you assholes touch my car?”

“Battery—batteries—” he hiccups.

“Both cars?”

“Y-y-y-y-yes?” and there’s a kind of honest fear you just can’t fake. And the kind that makes it next to impossible to get information out of someone. Deanna grits her teeth and drives the butt of the gun into the back of the asshole’s head, catching the back of his shirt and lowering him to the ground. Fine. She probably couldn’t have gotten to the Impala, anyway, not with who knows how many of these bastards out here. That’s fine. They had to have gotten up here somewhere.

Deanna heads for the little driveway. She doesn’t run. Running is too noisy. She keeps her profile low and follows the hard grooves of dirt down, around, going still when she hears voices.

There are two big trucks parked across the bottom of her driveway. They’re both off. The driver’s side door is open on one, and there’s a man holding onto it, talking lowly with a woman that is facing up towards Deanna’s cabin, a shotgun held easily in her hands. She hasn’t seen Deanna yet, but that’s a piece of luck that Deanna can’t see lasting more than a handful of seconds.

Deanna tucks the angel blade into her deep pants pocket, brings her gun up and on an exhale, starts shooting. The woman goes down, slapping at her shoulder. Deanna gets farther into the guy’s chest than she’d wanted to, but he’d lunged at the last second. Glass shatters around him. Deanna finishes by blowing out two of his truck’s tires, and if she hadn’t already given away her position, the sound that they make when they go does it.

Deanna runs for the second truck. The guy is yelling into a radio. The woman is trying to bring her shotgun up with only one arm. Deanna ignores them both, yanks open the other truck, kicks at the steering column, smiling grimly when it pops open. She loves old vehicles. Not just because they’re so easy to hotwire, but that’s a definite plus. Deanna twists wires together, jerks on the gear shifter, and slams her foot on the gas just as the first person comes tearing down the driveway.

Deanna rips off her night vision goggles, flips on the high beams, and leaves them in a cloud of dust and, hopefully, painful blindness.

#

Deanna drives until her adrenaline burns off enough for her to think about doing something else. Then she finds the nearest big, twenty-four hour store, and pulls into the parking lot. She’s got nothing. No phone. No shoes, even. The most she managed to bring with her out of the cabin were some weapons, which had been useful at the time, but are now less so. She thumps her head back against the seat, gives herself two breathes to get her shit together, and says, “Ok. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

There’s a GPS on the dash, leading right to her cabin from a couple of towns away. There’s a pistol in the dash, a flask that’s full of—after a quick sniff test—holy water, and a bag of salt. Ice flows down the back of Deanna’s neck. There are more guns in the back. There’s a long knife. There are Devil’s Traps painted on the bottoms of the seats. Hunters. They’d been hunters that came after her.

There’s a phone in the center console of the truck. Deanna punches in Bobby’s number with numb fingers, listens to it ring, has to swallow back the relieved sound that rises when he answers without a hint of pain in his voice. He starts, sleepily, “I don’t know who this is, but you better—”

“A group of hunters just hit my place. Are you safe?”

“Deanna?” any hint of drowsiness has disappeared. “What do you—are you hurt? What happened?”

“I’m fine,” she says, even as the bottoms of her feet start stinging and throbbing, reminding her that she just ran all over the yard and through broken glass. She grimaces down at them and, sure enough, there is blood smeared everywhere. “I can’t talk long. I’m in one of their trucks. This is their phone,” she laughs, swallows. “I just. You’re okay?” Bobby is all she has left. If someone came after him to get to her, she wouldn’t be able to—

“Don’t worry about me, kid,” Bobby is all gruffness and concern. He continues, “I’m coming to you.”

“What?” Deanna fights down the initial surge of relief in her chest. Having someone else to watch the door, having someone else to talk to, having Bobby around, that would be great. But. It isn’t safe, obviously. It’s nowhere even close to safe, and she can’t endanger anyone else with her shit. “No, Bobby, you can’t.”

Bobby snorts, “Forget it, girl, you shouldn’t be out there—”

“So help me,” Deanna interrupts, “if you say ‘in your condition’.”

Bobby sighs, impatient, “You shouldn’t be out there _alone_. Not in any condition. But, Deanna,” he tone shifts to something apologetic and gentle, “that baby is gonna be coming pretty soon. And you _really_ shouldn’t be alone when the time comes.”

Deanna hasn’t been thinking about that. It’s one thing to be pregnant. She’s managing that fairly well, she thinks. She takes her pills. She counts how many times the baby moves. She has drank more water in the past months than she has in the last ten years. But actually…delivering the kid. That’s a thought that’s she’s only explored in her nightmares.

What if it has wings? What if it’s not—viable, once it’s out in the world? She has no idea what to expect. The Nephilim in lore had all been giant badasses, as far as she can tell, but Cas wasn’t exactly a fully charged angel when they’d fucked. He’d been mostly human and so Deanna worries, when she allows herself, that the kid won’t be strong enough, that it won’t be able to hold itself together. She has this reoccurring nightmare where she is holding it in her arms, still bloody from birth, and it screams, and light bleeds from its eyes and mouth and she can’t, she can’t hold it in, it just—empties.

“Deanna?”

She shakes herself. Swallows and her throat is so dry that it clicks. “Right,” she says, into the suddenly stuffy air of the truck, “that’s, uh, that’s a good point.”

“I know,” Bobby says, “we’ll meet at Gabe’s old stomping grounds, alright? You remember, from how stupid you were, I assume?”

Deanna hangs up on him. She steals a car. Another car.

#

It’s stupid that a motel should dig around under Deanna’s skin and ruin her whole day, but it does. Deanna pulls up to the curb and all she can think about is Sam, and how much she wishes she could have just one more stupid fight with him. He would have been a great uncle, even if he would have been insufferable about eating right and shit. Deanna shakes the thoughts out of her head, and climbs out of her borrowed vehicle.

She beat Bobby, it would have been hard not to, with the way she was driving. Last time she talked to him, at a gas station two hundred miles from here, he had been maybe five hours out. Deanna rents a room, trudges up the stairs, and wards the room even though exhaustion is pulling at her bones. Even though there’s nothing she can do to keep people out, not if they want in badly enough. Not without killing them.

She settles in one of the crappy motel chairs with that in mind, keeps her gun in her lap, and leans her head back against the wall. She falls asleep as some point without meaning to, and wakes up to a knock on the door. Bobby calls from outside, before she gets a chance to slingshot into a fight response, “Hey, kid, I brought you some dinner.”

He hugs her when she lets him in, before he even puts the food down. Deanna holds on, longer than she should, smelling old books and whiskey on his jacket. It’s been a long time since she touched another person. When she pulls back, Bobby’s eyes are soft and fond. He reaches out and tugs on a strand of her hair, brushing her chin, and asks, “What’s this?”

Deanna shrugs, taking the food out of his hand and shoving some of the annoying mass of her hair behind an ear. “I’m not feeling particularly comfortable with scissors right now.”

“You look good,” Bobby says, after a pause, sarcastically. She can feel him squinting at her roughly bandaged feet. And yeah, she probably looks like shit. She hasn’t even had a bath since the cabin.

Deanna side-eyes him, popping open one of the take-out containers. She says, “Stop buttering me up. Sit down. Eat.” And, later, when she’s chasing around the last bite of food on her plate, her voice raw and embarrassing, “I’m glad you’re here, Bobby.”

He squeezes her shoulder, he says, “Nowhere else I’d rather be, kid.”

#

They don’t stick around town. There’s too much of a chance that someone overheard their conversation and might have somehow figured out where they meant to go. So they run across the country in choppy, crooked intervals, backtracking and doing their best to leave no trace of where they’ve been. Bobby is an old hand at going to ground, and it’s easier, with someone there to watch her back. Deanna can at least sleep now without the same degree of fear dogging at her.

As the weeks drag on they manage to travel less. Riding in the car—a new one that they purchased from a little, out of the way place that didn’t look like it was going to report them to anyone—becomes increasingly uncomfortable for Deanna. The skin over her stomach starts stretching tight. She can feel the baby’s back sometimes, when it rolls and presses it’s spine to her stomach. There are no lumps on it. And the baby book says that’s a good position for it to be in. Bobby agrees with a surety that Deanna doesn’t feel like questioning.

Sometimes she lies in the motel bed on her side and watches the kid press knees and elbows out against her skin. She runs a fingertip over the press of skin and spends an insane amount of her self-control refusing to think about Cas.

She’s only eight months pregnant the first time she thinks she’s in labor. But despite her panic, the pains pass and afterwards she locks herself in the bathroom and splashes water on her face until her fingers prune up and her hair and the front of her shirt are both soaked.

They hang around the southern states through the brunt of the winter. They go to the Grand Canyon on Deanna’s birthday, they stand there in the cold wind and Deanna looks at the river far below and when the baby starts rolling around she grabs Bobby’s hand and presses it to her belly. She tells him, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Just take it one step at a time, kid,” he says, “we’ll figure it out.”

#

Deanna goes into labor halfway through March. She doesn’t realize she is, at first. She’s had a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions, enough that the pain has become normal, and she thinks that’s all it is for a while. By the time she realizes that they’re not going away, that they are getting more and more frequent, in fact, she’s been having them for nearly two hours. When she tells Bobby he says, grim, “You sure you don’t want to go to a hospital.”

Deanna glares at him, but without heat. “Sure,” she bites out, “why not? I mean, if the angels and demons and hunters don’t find me there, I only have to hope that the kid comes out completely human.”

Bobby raises his hands, turning towards the bag they’ve assembled for this, all clean towels, thread, a needle, a little knife. He says, “Just asking.”

“Well don’t,” Deanna growls, and gives in to her impulse to pace.

The pacing helps. At first. She feels like she crosses in front of the shitty beds a thousand times. Maybe more. The bottoms of her feet and the insides of her thighs are aching when a contraction hits surprisingly hard, and she sways, catching herself against the foot of the bed. Bobby is there in a heartbeat, grabbing her other arm and supporting some of her weight and she pushes him away without thinking. She just wants to sink to her knees and, yes, and rock a little. It helps the pain.

Time moves in a haze, after that. No, it had been pretty hazy before. Deanna walks and kneels and remembers telling Bobby, at some point, that it doesn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would. “I imagine you’ve got a pretty high pain tolerance,” Bobby mutters back, and she shoves at him, and then kneels, panting.

Throwing up is an unpleasant surprise. She hears Bobby murmuring, “Sh, sh,” to her afterwards, wiping at her mouth and throwing a motel towel over the mess on the floor—mostly water, it looks like. Deanna hasn’t had a appetite. “It’s a good sign,” Bobby says, in response to whatever is on Deanna’s face, and she nods, trying to hold onto that. It’s a good sign, she repeats in her head, over and over and over again, it’s a good sign.

Bobby leaves her side at some point. Deanna is vaguely aware of him stripping one of the motel beds bare, spreading their clean towels on the mattress and the floor. She hears him go to run water. She’s burning up under her skin, her world folding down into the clench of her gut and the pain radiating from her hips and spine. “You can,” Bobby says, wiping a rag across her face, and it’s only then that she realizes she’s been mumbling to herself, words that have left her throat numb but that she can’t recall.

She says, instead, “Hurts.”

“It’s almost done,” Bobby says, and she has no idea if he’s just making shit up, but she wants to believe him, and so she does.

The pain gets worse. And different. Deanna manages, rocking back and forth on her knees, “I think, ah, I think,” and someday she will tell Bobby that she’s glad they talked about this beforehand. She’s glad that he just nods, that he helps her with steady hands over towards the motel bed, that when she shakes her head and balks at the thought of lying on it he just nods, and lets her kneel instead.

“You’re going to push with the contractions,” he tells her, in the midst of other words that buzz around her ears.

She manages, feeling blurry and exhausted, wrung out, “You sure?”

“Yeah, kid,” Bobby is always calm at the most insane times. He smiles at her, just a crinkle around his eyes, “I’m sure. You’re doing great.”

So she does. And, oh. Thought goes away. Deanna is a creature of blood and bone and pressure. Bobby’s voice rumbles but she doesn’t really hear the words. Her body is tearing itself to pieces. It is ripping apart. There is a rush of hot and wet and she cries out, more from surprise and pain. Sometimes inside her _drops_. Panic wells in the back of her throat and her guts spasm, Bobby says, apropos of nothing, “slow, slow,” and what Deanna feels she cannot describe.

Her legs go shivery and give. Somewhere beside her there is a hiccup and then a wail. Her baby. Her baby is crying. Her baby is _alive_.

Deanna pushes back up, she doesn’t think about how hard it is or how tired she is, or anything. Bobby is sitting there, staring at the baby, tiny and red and waving little arms and legs in jerky little punches and kicks. Deanna laughs, laughs and reaches for the tiny thing, counting toes, counting fingers, absently. She pulls the baby close, looks at its thick, dark hair and the gunk smeared all over its face and she wipes it away with her shirt. “Hey,” she says, grinning helplessly, “those are some lungs you’ve got.”

#

Deanna has a daughter. She stops crying when she gets fed, tiny little baby fists pressing against Deanna’s skin and tiny bluish eyes closing almost completely. Bobby is shoving the soiled towels into a giant trash bag, looking over at her every few minutes, probably to make sure that she’s still rubbing a circle on her stomach, or maybe just in awe of Deanna’s awesome kid. She wouldn’t blame him.

It’s all going surprisingly well, really, for a childbirth in a motel room midwifed by a guy that never delivered a baby before. It’s all good. Right up until Deanna smells smoke.

People start yelling around the same time she notices. Down the hall, someone slams their door closed and starts screaming about calling 911. Deanna looks down at the baby in her arms, looks across at Bobby and finds him already snatching a shotgun. He says, nodding at her, “I’ll check it out.” He adds, grimly, “Get mobile, if you can.” And then he’s out the door.

Deanna is not even wearing pants. She is covered with smears of her own blood. She has a kid that’s been born for a grand total of fifteen minutes in her arms. She eases to her feet, gingerly, because she hurts in all kinds of ways she’s never hurt before. She can _feel_ the gush of blood down between her legs which is just all kinds of not something she needed to feel. She ignores it, snatching her baggy pants which hang off of her now. She grabs the angel blade in her free hand.

Smoke is creeping into the room through the air vent.

“Shit,” Deanna hisses, “shit, shit, shit.” This could be coincidence, right? But Deanna doesn’t believe in those, not anymore. Someone has found her. She doesn’t know which of her pursuers it is. She doesn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.

She squints out the window, but the parking lot is a mess of people running around and smoke. And their new car, with the hood pulled off and the engine strewn across at least three parking spaces. She won’t be taking that, then. The thunder of a shotgun shakes her out of her thoughts and shoves her heart up into her throat. She throws a glance over her shoulder. There are red flickers of flame visible behind the air vent, now. “Shit,” she says again, meaningfully.

There are other cars in the parking lot. Better than staying here and cooking to death. Deanna shoves the door open and shoulders out, baby cradled close and shielded by her arm. The air outside is cold and thick with smoke. Deanna coughs against it and groans because _ow_ and almost misses the whisper of sound to her left. Almost, but not quite. There is suddenly, out of thin air, a body beside her. Deanna pivots while the angel is still appearing, and maybe she’s getting adrenaline superpowers, or maybe it had just been counting on her not to notice its presence. Maybe they haven’t noticed that she’s got a way to kill them, yet. Human weapons aren’t much of a threat to angels, after all.

Deanna buries the angel blade in its guts, jerks it free, and pushes it out of her way as it dies.

She picks a car at random and heads towards it as fast as her legs will carry her. She makes it maybe three steps before she’s blown off of her feet. The side of a van catches her. Deanna gags on pain, disoriented for a long second. One of her hands is pressed down on the gravel. She lost the angel blade. The baby—is still held close, Deanna’s shoulders and back shielded it from the impact and she is stupidly, drunkenly grateful about that. She’s worried that the kid isn’t crying. She’s just scowling, her wrinkly face all scrunched up. One little fist is waving around.

“Give it to me,” snaps the angel standing across from her. Deanna blinks up at him, his suit, the blade in his hand, the disgust and hatred on his face. Angels, she decides, really need to examine their hate-on for kids. Seriously, this guy is probably like her kid’s uncle, and this is what’s going on.

“Yeah,” Deanna pants, shaking her head, trying to find the angel blade without looking around too obviously, “that’s not gonna happen.”

“Then I will take it,” he snarls.

Deanna jerks back to her feet, something animal in the back of her head is dumping increasing amounts of adrenaline into her blood. She makes it another few steps, and then she’s slammed down again, this time on the ground, rolling to protect her baby and it’s only at that point that she realizes he’s playing with her. Hurting her because he can. Deanna blinks up at the early morning sky, the stars obscured by smoke, and lets out a helpless chuckle.

Her blade is gone. She thinks about a banishing sigil, she has the blood for it pretty much everywhere, but who the hell knows what that would do to her kid? Flinging a newborn—a half-human newborn—to wherever the angels go when they get evicted doesn’t seem like a great plan. Not if she wants her kid to live to be a day old, anyway.

She can hear the angel’s footsteps. She rolls up to her knees and one arm, she spits blood on the ground. When she looks up, the angel isn’t alone. There are six more spread out around him, all with identical looks in their eyes. The itch on the back of her neck says there are probably more, behind her. Ringing her in. She looks at them, hard, and then she pulls her aching body up to standing, wipes the back of her hand across her nose, and snarls, “Fuck you.”

The first angel laughs, ugly, and shoves his hand out towards her, fingers flared in a claw, and Deanna plays the last card she has, the only thing she can conceive of to save her baby’s life.

“Cas,” she says, swallowing the burn of fear in the back of her throat—what if he, but no, she can’t think it—she licks her lips, “Cas, if you can hear me, I need you.”

And there is a rustle of wings, a shift in the air, there is a familiar body beside her. The other angel freezes. Deanna hiccups on a laugh, disbelief, relief, dread, all trying to smother her. Cas looks just as she remembers him, same suit, same stupid coat, same dark hair, same blue eyes, fixing on Deanna for just a moment and then flashing over to the angels surrounding her. He demands, frowning and turning half-towards the arrayed angels, “What is going on here?”

“It is not your concern,” snaps an angel off to one side, an older woman with peroxide blond hair and an unpleasant sneer. “This human has whelped an abomination.” She spits. “We will destroy it shortly. Return to your duties.”

“She’s not an abomination,” Deanna snarls over the angel, surprised by her own surety, because what does she know, really. She could be wrong. But she doesn’t feel like she is. And it gets Cas’s attention back. He jerks his head towards her, and Deanna lifts her chin, uncurls one arm from around the baby, enough so that he can see it. “She’s a baby.” Deanna swallows, breathing hard, and manages, steadily as she can, “Cas, her name is Mary. And she’s yours.”

There’s an explosion of outrage from the gathered angels, but not from Cas. Instead, he freezes, goes inhumanly still. His eyes are wide and fixed on Mary. Dickhead angel takes an angry step forward, growling flat and furious, “If she speaks the truth, then this is your responsibility, Castiel. Clean up your mess,” he hisses. And he grabs Cas’s arm, jerking him.

Or trying to. Cas doesn’t so much as shift. He’s just staring at Mary. Deanna is starting to think maybe she broke him.

Asshole angel scoffs, he turns and orders, “Enough of this farce. Destroy—” and he gags on the Grace pouring out of his mouth, his body convulsing on the blade that Cas has shoved into his back. Cas’s other hand is on dickhead angel’s shoulder, and he pushes the body down, off of his blade. The body hits the ground in the middle of an encompassing silence, the entire world drawing in a breath and holding it.

Cas says, into that silence, his voice flat and hard, his shoulders rolling back, “No harm comes to the child. Disperse quietly and I will allow you to go.”

“You ‘will allow’?” Real Housewives of Heaven angel mocks, “You overreach yourself. Take him,” she says to the other angels, and smiles, something hateful and twisting, “and the child. After he has seen the error of his ways, we will give him the choice again.” And she snaps her fingers.

Deanna hasn’t seen a lot of angel on angel violence, not first hand. When she was helping Cas kick Raphael’s ass, they’d been entirely outmatched and resorted to a clever plan to make up for their lack of brute strength. Lucifer and Michael should have been the beat-down to end all beat-downs, but somehow Deanna was the only one who ended up getting her ass kicked that day, and she hadn’t had a celestial being riding along.

So she doesn’t really have anything with which to compare what happens in the parking lot.

The fact that there are blinding flashes every other second makes it hard to follow the action, anyway.

Deanna catches the fight mostly through the aftermath of violence, a pair of ash-black wings blazoned across the side of a van, Cas’s hand around Real Housewives’s throat, his lips pulled back from his teeth like some kind of animal. There is a whisper of sound and Cas is on the other side of the parking lot, the other angels converging on him. There is another wash of nuclear-bright light.

Deanna tears her attention away from the melee. The first angel that died is only a dozen feet away from her. No distance at all, really. But when Deanna takes a step she wavers. Her muscles are trembling and there’s a numbness in her fingers and toes. Her legs are sticky with blood. She has, she thinks, absent and distant, hemorrhaged. So her steps are clumsy and crooked, but she makes it. The angel fell on his blade, it is trapped under his chest and Deanna sinks to her knees, braces her free hand on his shoulder and rolls him.

The edges of the world go gray. Her heart is racing in her chest. She grabs the blade and tries to stand. She only makes it because someone grabs her by the back of her hair and hauls her bodily upright. A hand, fingers cruelly hard, grabs at her stomach and grips like a claw. Her new vantage point allows her to see Cas punch an angel in the face, and then slice his throat with the blade in his other hand. “Stop!” thunders a voice from beside her ear, “Cease immediately, or I will _pull your whore apart_.”

Cas is splattered with blood. His eyes are literally glowing, two spots of blue flame in the furious mask of his face. Deanna can’t see his wings, not on his back, but she can see the shadows of them across the ground, flared out so widely that she swears she can make out individual pinions. She’ll be the first to admit that she’s a bit woozy, though. And that she’s seeing at least three sets of shadows, which can’t be right.

The only thing she knows she isn’t mistaken about is the level of Cas’s fury. She’s not sure she’s ever seen him angry like this, not even with her, and Deanna prides herself on being able to infuriate those around her. So, really, she’s doing the angel behind her a favor when she stabs the blade back into him.

His hand, still wrapped in her hair, jerks as he dies. The back of Deanna’s head burns, hot and wet, and the angel drags her to the ground, dead, ha, weight.

Deanna pushes at his arm, but her limbs are barely responding now. It takes a horrendous amount of effort. She sits, shivering hard all of a sudden, and uses what strength she has left to keep Mary’s head supported. Someone screams her name, but Deanna has nothing left. She smiles down at Mary, her unfocused eyes, her downy eyebrows, her flat nose and tiny ears. “Your name is Mary,” she tells her, and drops her head enough to kiss Mary’s dark, impossibly soft hair.

Deanna can feel herself slumping sideways. Being horizontal seems like a good idea. The best idea. Gravity is impossible to resist and so Deanna doesn’t.

Someone catches her before she hits the ground. Deanna tries to lift the blade, but her arm doesn’t work. “Deanna,” Cas yells, way too close, and, oh, that is _Cas’s_ arm around her, that is his hand pressed against the side of her face, pouring power into her body. Deanna gasps, blinking to clear the spots from her vision, suddenly aware of her fingers and toes again, of the stink of blood and burnt ozone. She rolls her head up, in time to watch Cas lower his hand to Mary’s head, fingers cradling her skull and there is a glow of white from his palm that tears a cry for Deanna’s throat. “It’s alright,” Cas says, “she had to be hidden, from the others. We have to go. More will come, and soon.”

“Right, of course,” Deanna manages, her tongue feels clumsy and thick. Not from injury. She simply doesn’t know what to say, how to explain, if she should apologize, anything. She manages, stupidly, “Bobby, he was with me. We have to find him.”

“They have no interest in Bobby,” Cas says, still close. He has not moved, though Deanna is perfectly capable of supporting herself now. There are drops of blood drying across his face, a spray of it on the collar of his shirt. He is still touching Mary, she is shifting her head back and forth beneath his fingers. He is staring at the baby.

“I have the feeling he was making himself interesting,” Deanna grunts, getting her legs under her and standing. Cas rises with her, and it is with his arm around her that she gets her first completely coherent look at the parking lot. There are bodies and burned wings just scattered everywhere. It’s all illuminated by the red flames consuming the motel. “Holy shit,” she says, awed and horrified. Heaven is going to be _pissed_. She shakes her head, because she can’t worry about that. Find Bobby now. Worry about Heaven and the conversation she’s going to have with Cas, worry about the baby, worry about _everything_ else later.

Cas sticks to her side as they search the motel. The pressure of his hand, curled around her ribs, is weird at first, but Deanna has other things to focus on and so she just…accepts it. They find Bobby in the front office, wiping sweat off of his brow and standing in front of a circle of burning holy-oil, with three angels inside. He takes one look at Deanna and Cas and tucks his flask back into his pocket, nodding, “Well, about time you showed up.”

Bobby refuses Cas’s offer of transport. He hotwires a truck in the parking lot while sirens sound in the distance, offering as explanation, “I’ll do my best to put ‘em off of your trail, kid. You keep in touch, hear?” And then he’s gone.

“We need to go,” Cas says, and this time Deanna just nods. She’s tired. And he’s right.

#

Deanna blinks and when she opens her eyes they are in an empty apartment. The air smells like new paint. Everything is white or pale beige, from the carpet, to the refrigerator, to the walls, to the light fixtures. “Wow,” Deanna says, grimacing at the brown-red stains her blood covered feet are leaving on the plush new carpet, “where the hell are we?”

“New Hampshire,” Cas responds automatically, turning and slicing his hand open as he goes. His blood stands thick and dark on the white walls, dripping down the fresh paint and splattering on the baseboards and the carpet. Deanna watches him smear the first warding sigil on the wall, and then walks to the opposite side of the room and, grimacing, hitches Mary up against her shoulder so she can slice her own palm.

The apartment is small. There are only four rooms to ward. When Deanna looks out the bedroom window she finds an unfinished parking lot below. She turns away from the window and Cas is right behind her, wiping the blood off of his uninjured hand. He says, still staring at his hand, his voice carefully flat, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Deanna swallows. In her arms, Mary squirms around a little, waking up from baby dreams. Deanna had figured there was a fifty-fifty chance she’d have to have this conversation eventually. The other fifty percent had been the chance that Cas would take one look at Mary and slaughter her on the spot. So, really, this is the _good_ outcome. Deanna doesn’t know why she didn’t spend more time thinking about how it should go, what she should say, how to explain.

In the end, she settles on the truth. She says, trying to keep her voice steady, “The angels, all the other angels, they kept saying she was a monster. That she had to be killed.”

Cas looks up at her, his eyes narrowed, “And you thought I would agree?”

Deanna shrugs. “A sheriff usually enforces the law, Cas. I…” she shakes her head. Finding out that Cas wanted to kill their kid, it would have been too much. Deanna has been living on a shoe-string of hope for the last nine months, and she hadn’t been willing to risk severing it. She hadn’t been able to stomach the thought of Cas not being on her side in this.

Maybe he understands. Cas sighs heavily, he takes the last step to ease into her space, he says, “Can I…?” and touches Mary’s arm. Refusal is Deanna’s knee-jerk reaction. Could be he’d snap Mary’s neck as soon as she hands the baby over. But that’s stupid. Deanna wrestles down her paranoia and their arms tangle when she settles Mary into Cas’s hands. She looks tiny there, the back of her head cradled in Cas’s palm. She waves her arms and blows bubbles and the smile that breaks across Cas’s face makes Deanna’s breath catch in the back of her throat. “She’s a miracle,” he says, low and reverent and a shivery laugh punches out of Deanna’s chest.

“Yeah,” she says, “I guess so.”

#

Deanna could look at Cas holding Mary forever, but that would be a stupid thing to do. So she only looks at Cas holding Mary until her legs get tired of standing in one place, and she sinks down against the wall, stretching her legs out across the carpet and thunking her head back against the wall. She asks, picking at her bloody shirt, “What are we gonna do?”

Cas looks over at her, blinking to focus his eyes. He’s been staring at Mary’s sleeping face for so long that he must have every eyelash memorized. He shakes his head, just once, “I don’t know. If we had been able to keep her existence hidden from them…” he pulls Mary a little closer.

Deanna grimaces. Her fault, then. If she’d been more aware, if she’d thought about what she was doing, if she’d stayed off of the radar, then none of this would be happening, her daughter wouldn’t have been born with a price on her head. She starts, words bitter in her throat, “I—”

“You are not to blame. They would have found her eventually. They always have,” Cas grimaces, his gaze drifts back down to Mary and stays there. His voice is softer when he speaks again, “You kept her safe for longer than most would have managed.”

Deanna opens her mouth to protest, she would hardly call any part of the last nine months _safe_, but before she can get the words out, her stomach interrupts. It rumbles ridiculously loudly, and long, and it brings with it the realization that she is starving. Her body is finally easing down out of its fight reflex, all of her everyday needs are coming back.

“You’re hungry,” Cas says, obviously. Deanna pulls a face at him, but he doesn’t see it, he is too busy frowning at the remnants of her clothes, heavy with blood and in far worse shape than they were when she put them on a day ago. “And you need clothing. I’ll make a,” he frowns at the expression, “a supply run.”

Panic hadn’t gone far, and it rushes back now. “Cas, no,” Deanna starts, lurching to her feet, because no, no, he just showed up and she doesn’t want—she doesn’t want to be alone.

“It’s alright,” Cas smiles, just a little, pushing Mary into Deanna’s arms. She is warm from where Cas has been cuddling her, and she stretches one arm up between them, scrunching her face up without waking. “Ward the door again as soon as I leave. Deanna,” he pauses, and for the first time she can see his nerves, strung tight beneath his skin. He hesitates and when he looks at her she can’t read his gaze at all, “if I’m not back within half an hour, run. Run far and run fast. Don’t,” he swallows, “don’t trust me. If I find you.”

“Cas,” she wants to protest, but he’s already smearing one of the sigils, yanking the door open, and then he’s just gone. Deanna’s heart beats in her ears while she redraws the sigil. By then, Mary is starting to fuss around, nuzzling against Deanna’s shirt. Deanna feeds her, hoping it will take her mind off of waiting. It does not.

#

Cas shows up with three minutes to spare. He knocks on the door, which strikes Deanna as just hysterically funny. It’s been too long since she slept. Cas is laden with bags that smell delicious and they exchange burdens while closing their defenses once more. Deanna eats so quickly and with such relief that she barely tastes the food. Her stomach hurts from how much she eats, but whatever.

She doesn’t ask, afterwards, how Cas knew what size she wore. It’s either a memory of when he shoved her soul back into her body, or a closer one, more personal one, and either way, Deanna doesn’t feel like bringing it up. She just takes the bag of clothes into the empty bathroom. She shucks off her dirty garments, wiping at the blood that’s stained against her skin, pulling reassuring layers over her skin.

Deanna is more impressed that Cas picked out clothes she liked, than that he knew her size. She’d been mostly sure he was going to come back with a suit, trench coat, and tie. She looks at herself in the mirror above the bathroom sink and she looks like herself, in jeans and flannel and soft jersey material. It’s only her hair, long and shaggy, that marks her as different from the woman she was last time she and Cas were alone together. She shoves the stupid mass of it back away from her face, wishes the water here worked, and goes back into the living room.

Cas is still standing, holding Mary. He’s swaying just a little bit, side to side, but Deanna doesn’t think he’s aware of it. He’s humming, low and deep, soothing. When Deanna pads across to him, she finds that Mary has grabbed one of his fingers, that she is squeezing it in her sleep, a little bubble of spit on the edge of her mouth. Deanna’s chest feels too tight, abruptly, something joyful and huge warring with the deep, bitter fear that’s settled into her bones. She waits for one emotion to win, but they just hang there in equilibrium.

She touches Cas’s arm, to let him know she’s done, to distract herself from her thoughts. She’d meant only to get his attention, and she succeeds too well. A spark jumps between them, she can feel him inhale, she can feel the shift of his being towards her. She’d meant the touch to be impersonal, but it is anything but. “Sorry,” she blurts, jerking a step backwards, and Cas follows, matching her movement perfectly.

Deanna stares at him, trying to read his expression, and her stomach flips over at it. His eyes are dark and fixed on her face. There is too much in them. In the back of her head she can hear the way he’d screamed her name in the parking lot of the motel, the panic, the heartbreak, she says, helplessly, because he should be _angry_, not this, “Cas…”

“I’ve missed you,” he breathes into the air, low and intense, a confession. “Often I…thought of you,” and it would be easier if he blushed, or looked flustered, but there’s nothing in his expression but open, brutal honesty. “I should have come for you, no,” he shakes his head, a quick jerk, mouth setting his anger, “I should never have—”

“Cas, don’t,” she manages, because she isn’t sure this is a confession he really wants to make. He just found out he had a kid. Deanna has had months to get used to the idea, and it still messes with her, sometimes. She doesn’t want him to, to regret this, later. “Don’t unless you’re…” and she trails off, because what can she end with? Don’t unless you’re _sure_? Who is she to demand that of anyone? And there’s a part of her, a huge part, that selfishly wants to hear him say it, and if she calls it back, refuses to accept it until he’s thinking clearly, then she’ll never get it, and—

“I never should have left,” Cas says like he’s sure, hard and firm and with a flash of his eyes that makes Deanna’s toes curl up, naked without her boots. She can feel her eyes grow wide, her chin jerks to the side in automatic denial, and Cas growls, jerks his arm up, and his hand is strong and familiar, cupping the back of her head. He kisses her hard and her fingers squeeze closed around his arm, she pulls him closer instead of pushing him away. Mary squirms between them.

Cas drawls back, just enough for Deanna to breathe and she gulps at the air, lightheaded with the last five minutes. He says, hoarse, “If I could—”

Deanna has had enough ‘ifs’ for a lifetime. Her own regrets hang heavy around her throat. _If_ she had prayed to Cas earlier, would her daughter have been safer? _If_ she had been clever enough to use protection, none of this would be happening. She can’t have Cas’s ifs, too. They will drown her beneath the weight of the life they might have had, instead of the one that they’re living.

And so she rocks up to the balls of her feet, she kisses him and it is nearly unbearably soft. She says, her eyes closed so that she can speak the words, “You’re here now.”

And then she yawns hugely. It’s been a long twenty-four hours.

“You need rest,” Cas says against her mouth, like he’s reminding himself. He draws back slowly, fingertips skimming the line of her jaw. “Sleep,” he says, shrugging his jacket down his arms and sinking down against the wall and gazing up at her expectantly, “I’ll guard you both.”

Well, she can’t ask for better than that. Deanna curls up on her side, one arm tucked under head. Outside the sky is overcast. There is the edge of a chill in the air. Cas drapes his coat over her, and it’s stupid, how comforting it is. Deanna closes her eyes, smelling old blood and ozone and Cas’s skin. She says, already half-asleep, “Wake me when she’s hungry.”

#

“Is there anywhere we can go?” Deanna asks later, when she’s picking apart a cold pop-tart and trying to rub wakefulness back into her face. She is still exhausted. “Anywhere they wouldn’t think to look, I mean?”

Cas shakes his head, “Angels are nothing if not thorough.”

Deanna hadn’t expected anything better. She swallows the dry lump of food in the back of her throat and it hurts. What has she done? What is she going to do? “We can’t—we can’t take on Heaven.”

“We’ve tried before,” Cas says softly, but he doesn’t sound any more enthusiastic about it than Deanna feels.

“They weren’t willing to kill me, then.” And if something—God, or whatever—hadn’t brought Cas back he’d be dead a couple of time over already. She rubs at her forehead, the steady pound of the headache there is driving her to distraction, she’s exhausted and achy. “Why is this such a big deal, anyway? So you had a kid. Who the hell cares?”

Cas is silent for a long time, long enough for Deanna to look over at him. He is staring down at his hands, his face pinched into a frown. He says, finally, “My allegiance is supposed to be to Heaven. _Only_ to Heaven, Deanna. But I killed eight of my brothers and sisters earlier. Because they threatened Mary. My loyalty…” he grimaces, “they fear the division of loyalties.”

Deanna swallows, at least she can understand that. No one likes to see their powerbase dissolved. But still, “You’ve killed angels before,” it’s a horrible thing to bring up, she knows that it eats away at Cas, but it’s no less true for all of that. He’s been killing angels off and on for two years, Cas hasn’t really even been very good at following the letter of the law, and they hadn’t seemed to have any hard feelings about it after the apocalypse.

“Yes,” Cas sighs, he rubs his thumb down over his knuckles, “but they have…reluctantly agreed that I seemed to have been following our Father’s will. Why else would I have been returned to life?”

“So can’t we convince them this is your daddy’s will, too?”

Cas shrugs, “I doubt it. They’ve believed for millennia that such a child is an abomination.”

Deanna could scream, but she doesn’t. Mary just fell asleep, after all. “Great. Great. So, Heaven still buys the miscegenation bullshit, that’s awesome, your family is officially the worst in-laws ever. And we’re not going to be getting any help from my species, either.”

Cas stills, “What do you mean?” And, oh, she had forgotten that he didn’t know about the hunters. She laughs, dry and half-choked, and tries to explain exactly how screwed up the last nine months were. By the time she’s done Cas’s face is set into an expression of cold anger, his hands are clenched up into fists and his eyes are, again, half-aglow. He snarls, when she is finished, “I will…”

“Hey,” Deanna interrupts, uncomfortable and off-balance with his reaction, “let’s worry about the people trying to kill us right now.”

Cas snorts, “Very well.”

#

They leave the apartment with the next day’s sunrise, Mary tucked in close to Deanna’s chest with some weird-ass sling-thing that Cas picked up on his voyage out for supplies. When they settle, Deanna can hear the sound of waves against the beach and smell salt on the air. They are standing on a dilapidated pier, leading to a small patch of gray sand, a tiny little shack standing in the midst of elephant grass and scrub brush.

“Where are we?” Deanna asks, hitching her shoulders up against the bite of the wind. The sky above is gray and cloudless and the ocean below is just as gray, broken only by the white crests of the waves moving towards shore. There are barnacles growing up the rotting logs of the pier, there is a bundle of rope out towards the edge that has frayed apart into wisps and straggly lumps.

“Off the coast of Florida,” Cas says, distracted by pulling open the door to the shack and carrying in the bags of blankets and food that they brought along. Deanna stares at the gray melding of the sky and the sea for another long moment, and then turns and follows him inside. The shack is only one room. It, too, is remarkably gray. There is a sink along one wall, white and wide and cracked. There’s a narrow bed beneath a grimy window. There is sand strewn across the wooden floor and bird’s nests in the rafters. There is a single light-bulb hanging down in the middle of the room, but when Deanna flips the switch by the door it does nothing. She hadn’t expected otherwise.

“Alright, Crusoe, how the hell did you find this place?” she asks, because if she had been asked to imagine where Cas hung out when he wasn’t with her this isn’t…really what she would have pictured.

Cas looks over, closing the sigil he’d been working on with a smear of his palm. “Jimmy Novak’s family came here once, when he was a child. The island belonged to his maternal grandparents.”

“Oh,” Deanna is sorry she asked. Not that she doesn’t appreciate the fact that no one is trying to kill her or her kid at the moment. But she feels a bit strange about being in the childhood vacation home of a dead guy whose body her—her Cas is inhabiting.

“There are no other people here, the dock is the only place for boats to dock on the island,” Cas continues, moving to the next wall, “and the angels have no reason to look here. We should be safe here, for a while.” And that makes up for any lingering weirdness Deanna might feel about it. She lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

She catches Cas’s shoulder when he moves to brush past her, towards the back wall, and he stumbles to a stop, as though he’s forgotten exactly what he was doing. Deanna says, meaning it, “Thank you.” She squeezes his shoulder and he mirrors the touch, except that his hand is larger than hers, and his thumb brushes the side of her neck. She clears her throat, feeling heat rising under her skin, because she isn’t sure if the kiss yesterday had been an aberration born of emotion and exhaustion, or what, and blurts, “We should slap down some Devil’s Traps, too.”

Cas is watching her with his head tilted to the side. There is something curious and dark in his eyes. He says, and she swears his voice is lower than it was a moment ago, “Yes. Of course.”

#

They make their little island as safe as they can, and then Cas goes to get some more supplies. Deanna doesn’t ask how she’s supposed to run if he’s not back in thirty minutes, if that’s still a rule. She’s still clinging to the idea of being _safe_, even if it’s only for a few days. Besides, Cas is back in twenty, hauling a bassinet, blankets that haven’t dry-rotted, and delicious food. She eats, feeding Mary at the same time, and then leaves Cas to burp her, because she discovered an object of interest while hiding Devil’s Traps earlier.

There is a shower head on the outside of the shack, and, amazingly, it works. The water is cold and smells vaguely of brine, but it doesn’t detract from Deanna’s enjoyment when she stands under it. Cas had angelled away the blood she was covered it, but she hasn’t felt clean since—since Mary’s birth, really. She stands under the cold spray, under the gray sky, and scrubs her hair and her skin, digging her toes into the chilly sand.

The cold raises gooseflesh over every inch of her skin, but Deanna lingers under it anyway. She touches her stomach, and finally has time to push at it. She has gotten so used to the sight of it stretched full, to the feel of her skin, that it is strange, now, for it to be flat. She presses her knuckles in hard over her belly-button, and there is no pain, though she expects it. She remembers, in a jarring flash, a hot rush of blood down her thighs, something torn inside of her gut.

But Cas put that back together, didn’t he? Well. She’s not going to complain about that. She swallows back the nauseous feeling rising in her throat. She rinses off her feet, for all the good it’s going to do, and gives in her shivers. She wrings her hair out, the strands feel tangled and coarse now, and she makes a go of combing the mess of it with her fingers before giving up. She pulls her over-shirt across her shoulders, the fabric clings to her damp skin, and gathers the rest of her clothes in a bundle.

She finds Cas rocking Mary back and forth in his arms. He has removed his coat, and, shockingly, his jacket has joined it, draped over the one chair that is sitting in the shack. His shirtsleeves have been pushed up his arms haphazardly. Deanna wastes a moment grinning at them helplessly, before shutting the door, pulling the chair over and wedging the back of it beneath the knob, for the limited amount of good that would do to stop the things and people after them.

When she looks up, Cas is staring at her. He’s gone still.

Deanna clears her throat, she manages, “Uh, we need towels, by the way,” tingly and aware of the damp edge of her shirt against her thighs, of a line of water running down the inside of her calf.

“Alright,” Cas says thickly. He is still staring, but she doesn’t think he realizes it. Or maybe he does. He settles Mary into the bassinet and presses a fingertip against her temple. He says, moving to her with two long steps, “Tell me if I misunderstand,” and he cups the line of her jaw, he leans in and kisses the salt-water taste out of her mouth.

“Wait,” she says, against his mouth, because he isn’t—he isn’t exactly the same as he was back before the world ended, when he’d been as much a human as he’d been an angel, severed from Heaven and half-fallen, “are you sure, do you, I thought angels didn’t—”

Cas wraps his other arm around her back, pulls her flush against his body. His dick is hard, presses against her hip. He says, “I am very sure,” and kisses her again, and she’s been telling herself she didn’t care, that it didn’t matter if he didn’t—couldn’t—feel the same desire for her. That it was enough for him to care about whether Mary lived or died. But, oh, what a lie that was. She grabs at the collar of his stupid shirt throws herself into the kiss.

And she doesn't know what will happen later, not even an hour later, but, abruptly, it doesn't matter.


End file.
